


i have this breath, i hold it tight

by kshaar



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Post-Canon: For the Movie anyway, gratuitous alliteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25511476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kshaar/pseuds/kshaar
Summary: A reconciliation over five centuries in the making. Andy brings a labrys to a gun fight. Quynh does one better.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 27
Kudos: 280





	i have this breath, i hold it tight

**Author's Note:**

> @vice_vereesa, thanks for the readthrough 💛💛

It goes like this— 

She shoots Andromache, and the kid jumps to shield her. Naive and loyal and so, so young as she crumples to the ground. When Quynh first met Andromache, millennia ago, two of those three aspects had already long deserted her. Yet she can understand it. Andromache always draws loyalty around herself. People offering their devotion, their lives, their deaths. Quynh would have done the same herself, once. Had believed they both would have, before she discovered the truth.

They cluster around the kid, coddling her like this is of consequence. Andromache reaches for her, falling to her knees and out of Quynh’s range from this vantage. She is barely visible as she sits the kid up, leans her against a cargo container and goes completely out of her sight. Yusuf is a cleaner target where he stands far enough behind Andromache. It would be an easy headshot. But what can she say, she’s a romantic. And they have time. She watches Yusuf move out in the open and carefully scan the area, waiting for the new kid to heal, as the dim twilight creeps over the port.

She shifts the scope to the other side, and straight into Nicolò’s eyes. He winks.

Quynh drops the rifle, allows herself a grin, picks up her handgun and leaps down from her nest to greet her old friends.

* * *

Here’s one of the biggest things Nile has learned: finding out _you’re immortal now_ and finding out _you’re not immortal anymore_ , is pretty much the same as far as the effect it has on your rational judgement. Which is to say, it fucking does not.

If anything, Andy has sped up with her new mortality, like it came with a bucket list. A violent bucket list with a high kill count that Andy is trying to hurtle through, a pilgrimage to all sites of crime she can touch and change, while she still can. To break as many of them before she breaks. And if Nile has not quite managed to lose her Normalcy Meter in her six months with them, it works out, cause Andy isn’t even looking for hers.

They’re going after human traffickers right now, Copley’s intel’s led them to a container port with loud gull-screams, grime, and a dirty sea-breeze sweeping around the spaces between the tall metallic container-walls. There’s a warehouse that’s been empty too long, some logistics documentation that doesn’t match, and—honestly, if the man could figure out _secret immortal centuries-old warriors_ from what he had to go on, Nile thinks she can trust him to find out where some traffickers are based.

Here’s another thing she’s learned: sniper nests are kinda easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for. Especially outside supposedly abandoned warehouses. Nile moves before the thought completes itself, shifts just in time for a bullet to tear down through her shoulder and into her chest. The sharp, white-hot burst of pain subsides as the bullet leaves the way it entered to _clink_ on the asphalt, but Nile still falls with it. The fall is not _all_ pretense; but it will buy them time. 

Nicky and Joe help drag her so Andy can get herself out of sight, which she is already complaining about. Joe shares a fond look with Nile, Nicky touches Andy’s shoulder.

“Deflect a sniper’s bullet with your labrys,” Nile mutters to her, “then we can talk.” Andy tosses a smile her way, softening suddenly like she does when snapped out of her head and free of the frenetic focus that sometimes drives her. 

She brings her hand to Nile’s shoulder, moves the ripped, bloody cloth with her thumb. “It’s getting quicker.” 

Nile just looks at her.

That bullet would have hit Andy’s heart. They both know it.

_If it’s my time, it’s my time_ , Andy will say; they both know that too.

Andy just pats her shoulder, and they watch Joe try to bait the sniper into making a move, Nicky circle around the container and try to get closer. They wait a couple of minutes, and hear shooting start behind them.

“It still hurts,” Nile says, clutching the now smooth, unbroken skin of her shoulder. 

Andy indulgently rolls her eyes. “I’m not staying out of the fight, Nile.”

“Worth a shot,” Nile tells her, and Andy starts—

“ _Andy!”_ Nicky calls out: _Andy_ , not _Boss_ , and tension thrums through his voice in a way Nile has never heard, a sharpening stone against a bladed edge. Andy is already up and out, reaching for the gun in her waistband. Nile runs to keep up.

They’re fighting one person, a woman. Nicky’s on the ground as his knees and head heals, scrabbling for his gun. Joe’s going for a full tackle at her, shouting, “Will you listen?” He sways to the side to intercept her next shot she aimed at Andy, takes it in his gut and keeps running. Nicky shoots her hand through the opening he gets, making her curse and drop the gun and she stands there unmoving until Joe hits—

No. 

Shit, she’s there and then she’s just _gone_ , she flips over his head and lands behind him, kicks his leg hard enough that Nile winces when he goes sprawling. The woman takes four of Nicky’s bullets across her stomach, and turns towards Andy, waves a hand at her even as broken fingers sprout back out. Wait.

“Andromache!” The woman calls out. “It’s been a long time.” _Wait, that’s—_

Andy falters.

If that wasn’t confirmation enough, “Quynh,” she whispers. Then louder, “Quynh! What are you—” 

Quynh smiles, tilts her head, and just before Joe’s attack would connect she _shifts_ again, Nile has never seen anyone move that way outside of martial arts movies. Her hands are empty, Nile blinks, and she is suddenly surrounded by an intricate pattern of—she’s spinning it so fast around herself that Nile can’t even see it. She can hear the metallic rattling whisper, fast as _fuck_ , Quynh turns to look at Joe and flicks, and blood blooms on his chest and he stumbles back. She advances on Nicky. One second he’s aiming at her, the next there is nothing in his hands, the gun clattering somewhere. Quynh’s two chain whips slow, she snaps them back and they fold somehow, and she catches one in each hand.

“Talk to me, come on,” Andy calls out again, moves closer. “ _Quynh_.” 

“About what, how you abandoned me under the ocean?” Quynh twists her chain whips, smooth as silk ropes; strikes out precise enough to break Andy’s neck, Andy, who enters the maelstrom without hesitation. Andy, who knows how to lean outside the trajectory, jump over the other chain coming at her waist, duck again then leap to a side so Quynh must turn away from the others to face her. Andy throws her gun at Quynh’s head and Quynh laughs, high and delighted as she dodges it. Nile sees Andy grin, like in the plane but different, and reach for her labrys. Quynh bares her teeth before whipping the chain again. “Dance with me, my heart.” 

And it is a dance. A liquid dance of blurred limbs and leaps, quick as lightning and just as deadly. 

Andy lets the chains wrap around her labrys and _tugs_ , tries to overbalance her, meet her eyes. “We tried, we searched for so many years. You must believe I tried.” 

“What a comfort that was to me while I lay under the ocean gasping for my life, my love, over and over and _over—”_ She strikes out with each repetition, Andy blocks them with the labrys which she’s holding two-handed, horizontally. The next hit _clangs_ against the blade, sparks flying off it.

Andy’s grounded in her twists and weaves, and Quynh is a crackling storm around her. She backflips to avoid Andy’s slice, and stays airborne for half a second too long in the air. Lands oddly gentle, letting the labrys chase her into a roll and letting it sweep just over her head. Just like how the chains seem to have Andy’s permission to snap around her, never quite touching. Andy’s still trying to speak, “What do you want?” and “Dammit, _stop_ ,” and “What can I do?” but Quynh replies only with her snarl, raining down strikes that are both speeding up and gaining force. 

It is almost a choreographed sequence, a painting in motion, chilling and awe-inspiring until it’s _not._ Andy makes the first contact, a boot to the knee as Quynh lands from another flip. Quynh whips around, _a pit viper_ , Nile remembers them telling her, and the chain reaches out, an extension of her arm—it sings, and Nile can feel that the strike is true in her gut before it ever makes contact.

Blood wells up to the slash on Andy’s temple. Andy flinches.

Quynh is fast. She pushes her advantage, pushes Andy back and tries to wrap her chains around Andy’s torso; Andy deflects one, the other catches around her arm, goes around her waist and winds, wraps, halts.

Andy is still bleeding.

Quynh is not slow.

Andy is still bleeding and Quynh stumbles, the other chain stuttering to whip around her own leg, eyes tracking her panicked fury from Andy’s temple over to Joe and Nicky and Nile, and finally reads their protectiveness for what it is.

“No,” Quynh whispers, shaking her head, and the chain slackens. “Andromache.”

* * *

Andromache tilts her head, watches her and waits, wordless.

“That’s—You don't get to— _No!_ ” Quynh roars, she pulls the chain and Andromache goes with it willingly, one hand bound to her side, the other holding onto her labrys. She lets herself move forward with the tug until she stumbles, chest to chest with Quynh.

Five hundred years.

She can feel Quynh’s heartbeat thunder, gallop alongside her own.

She shouldn’t. She knows she shouldn’t, but she closes her eyes and exhales. She is so tired. 

“I’m sorry,” Andromache says, “I know I—” and Quynh kisses her.

The kiss jolts through her bones like lightning, hairs at the nape of her neck rising, a shiver running to her wrists. She reaches—vaguely hears metal clanging by their feet and then Quynh’s hands are hot under her jacket, pressed to her sides—Andy reaches for her hair, that familiar soft length, the jaw she hasn’t felt in five centuries, the column of her neck, her throat, her shoulder, Andy pulls back to look at that beloved face.

Quynh’s old smile peeks out, she glances over Andy’s hair, and raises an eyebrow. 

“Oh, it's not like you haven't seen it before,” Andy says, resisting the urge to avoid her eyes. Quynh’s quicksilver eyes. She sees fury wash over fondness, and sorrow chase that away.

“You can’t leave,” Quynh swallows. “Don’t you _dare_ , Andromache. You promised.” There’s nothing she can say. Andy pulls her close to kiss her again.

Quynh kisses back like she carried the ocean’s push-pull with her, and its saltwater.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Quynh’s (entrance fighting the team, calling andy ‘my heart/my love’, being under the sea for 500 years, specifically, is) based on the comics, but her weapon is not. Noriko carries daishō, the katana+wakizashi dual swords, which are famously Japanese. I was looking at Vietnamese martial weapons and came across the nhuyễn tiên, or the chain whip—which is kinda self-explanatory, that has a dart on the other end that does the hurting. For a character described both in the movie and the comics as fighting like a “pit viper”, I thought it would be fun. They’re so fast that they have flags on them so they can be visible when they’re being used.
> 
> 2\. Having 6k+ years combat-experienced Andy mow through people nowhere close to her league is one thing. Fighting someone with whom you were for mumble thousand years, and you’re someone who gets feral joy out of fighting, are functionally invulnerable & able to learn insanely dangerous moves? @Second movie 👀👀
> 
> 3\. Title from Florence + The Machine’s Between Two Lungs
> 
> 4\. Thanks for reading!


End file.
